How to choose one
The questions worth asking before you sign. They hold for us as much as for anyone else, and perhaps on one or two of them our answer is not the one you expect.
The digital concierges on the market look alike on screen and differ in four places, which are also the four places where you find out six months later that you chose badly. If you are not yet sure what we are talking about, start with what a digital concierge is.
1. How you pay
There are two models. The first is a flat fee per property, where you pay one figure whatever the number of rooms; the second works out a price per room, so the bill grows with the size of the property.
Under twenty rooms the difference is large and always points the same way: a per-room price of a few euro becomes, across ten rooms, two or three times a flat fee. Over fifty it flips, because a flat rate designed for small properties will not carry a large one's volumes. Do the sum on the rooms you actually have.
The second question about price is what happens when you close. If you work from April to October, a subscription that cannot be paused makes you pay for five months of nothing.
2. Who writes the answers
This is the question that separates a serious product from a demo. The assistant has to answer with your property's information, and somebody has to put that information in.
- How long it takes to load it, and whether you can start from what you already have, such as the in-room guide as a PDF
- Who updates it when a time changes, and in how many clicks
- What happens to a wrong answer: is it corrected at the source, or reported to somebody
If the answer to the first question is “we will take care of it”, ask what happens when you change the breakfast menu once the season has started.
3. What it does when it does not know
No assistant knows everything about your property on day one, the whole difference between a serious product and a demo lies in what happens then. An honest one admits it and passes the request to a person.
Ask to see it live on a question it cannot possibly know the answer to. It is a test that takes thirty seconds and tells you more than half an hour of presentation.
4. How much work is left with you
Answering is half the job. The other half is what happens next: the late check-out request has to reach whoever deals with it, carrying the room, the language and the time, and the status has to update itself under the eyes of whoever asked. If instead a generic notification arrives that somebody has to copy out by hand, you have moved the work, not removed it.
The three questions around the edges
The minimum term first of all: a year of contract for a product that goes live in five minutes is out of proportion. Then the languages, which are worth testing by writing something in each. And finally the guest data, meaning which of it gets collected: the best answer is none, because what is not there does not need protecting either.
If you want to compare these answers with ours, you will find them on the pricing, features and frequently asked questions pages. The sum for your own property is on the how much you save page.
In short
- Do the sum on the rooms you actually have, and on the months the property is shut.
- Ask who loads the property's information, and who updates it when a time changes.
- Try it live on a question it cannot possibly know the answer to.
- Watch where a request goes once it has been answered: if somebody copies it out by hand, the work has only moved desk.
Any other questions, ask us.
Twenty minutes together are enough for a demo and for every answer you need.